
ARMSTRONG AND WORLD 
FREEDOM 



FOUNDER'S DAY ADDRESS BY 
HON. WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT 



ARMSTRONG AND WORLD 
FREEDOM 



FOUNDER'S DAY ADDRESS BY 
HON. WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT 
PRESIDENT OF HAMPTON'S 
BOARD OF TRUSTEES 






Reprinted from the Southern Workman 
March, 1918 



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ARMSTRONG AND WORLD 
FREEDOM * 

BY WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT 

President of Hampton's Board of Trustees 

HALF a century ago Samuel C. Armstrong, born in and in- 
fused with the Christian missionary spirit, founded this 
great institution. Shakespeare makes Mark Antony say: "The 
evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with 
their bones." Of course this is not true; General Armstrong's 
life and death and what has followed refute it utterly. 

Twenty-five years ago he laid down his task to those who 
were to follow. Today is the day we celebrate in his name. He 
left us Hampton and the Hampton spirit. It is not that he 
founded a school whose buildings have survived him, as those 
which William of Wickham built. It is not that he founded a 
school whose organization and purpose survive him, or one like 
Harvard, Yale, and Cornell, with his name. Hampton does not 
bear his name, and yet he lives here in the work of his hands, his 
heart, and his brain, as no other founder of an institution of 
learning ever did. 

Go to the University of Virginia and you will find something 
resembling it in the spirit of Jefferson, who lives there still, but 
not in the warmth of the spirit of Hampton— something which 
Armstrong breathed into this school of learning, something that 
here continues as a living fire. 

It was the free spirit of free service that Armstrong taught. 
He taught a race the spirit of progress from slavery to self-re- 
spect, from enforced service to voluntary service in the duty of 
the citizen and the obligation to the community and the neighbor- 
hood. He founded it in free, intelligent skill, and hard, contin- 
uous labor. He taught the obligations of freedom. He taught 
the unending pleasure and satisfaction of work well done and of 
duty performed. 

From the platform of yonder gymnasium I heard President 
Eliot of Harvard University say that it was Armstrong who laid 
the foundations in this country of the great system of vocational 
training; and Hampton today is the best exponent in this country 



Address delivered at Hampton Institute in celebration of Founder's Day. January 27, 1918 



6 

of the practical benefit to be derived from that kind of a system. 
It was suggested to him by the helpless ignorance of an enslaved 
and suddenly emancipated race. He enforced the necessity for 
the love of intelligent labor as dignifying all who engaged in it; 
and it is, in spite of the objections of those who contend other- 
wise, it is the solution of the race problem, because with that 
everything else in life that is worthy to attain, that is useful to 
attain, can be achieved. 

He launched the struggle of a race to deserve freedom, to 
vindicate its citizenship, to justify equality of opportunity. It is 
given to few men to win by their own efforts, unaided by circum- 
stances, opposed by prejudice, injustice, and contemptuous criti- 
cism, the victory which was Armstrong's. His name will go 
down in history with Lincoln's, as a great benefactor of the Negro 
race. A quarter of a century has not dimmed the lustre of his 
name or work. He lives forever in his continuing benefaction 
and in the hearts of the race he saved. 

And now, today, we mourn his successor, Hollis Burke Fris- 
sell— a contrast to General Armstrong and yet essential in carry- 
ing on the work of his leader. Recognizing the primary and 
fundamental value of the Armstrong spirit, he kept himself, in 
his modesty, in the shadow of Armstrong's great name. Not a 
brilliant preacher, not distinguished as a teacher, he was wonder- 
ful as an executive, wonderful in winning the loyalty and enthusi- 
asm of his Hampton men and women, in retaining and enlarging 
the number of Hampton's supporters, and in making its value and 
excellence known to the white men of the South, who must co- 
operate to make this great work a success. He was Christlike in 
his spirit and in his way of winning the great influence he wielded. 
Broad, catholic, sweet, and reasonable, farseeing and firm of con- 
viction, sympathetic but stimulating, with a vision of increased 
usefulness for Hampton, he supplemented General Armstrong's 
work as no other could have done. He lived and was the Hamp- 
ton spirit, which General Armstrong breathed into this place and 
this environment. He felt and fanned the religious fervor and 
faith that are indispensable to Hampton and its men and women 
if they are to attain the goal General Armstrong sought. 

Happy an institution and a race who have had two such 
leaders as Armstrong and Frissell. Their successor — straightfor- 
ward, effective, earnest, religious, broad, and feeling the joy of 
service and full of the greatness of the task he assumes — we may 
be confident will prove to be a worthy follower of the great men 
who have gone before. 

And now, my friends, what would these men — these two 
men — have done in the presence of the crisis that faces Hampton 
and faces the country, faces the country and the world, and Hamp- 



ton sympathetically with the country and with the world ? 
Against our will, against our prayers, we are in this great war. 
In 1776 this country fought for the independence of the United 
States— the freedom of a nation. In 1861 to 1865 it fought and 
lost lives and treasure without number, for the integrity of the 
Union and the freedom of a race. And today, for three years, 
and for how many years in the future we know not, we fight for 
the freedom of the world. 

As we look back upon the course which our country has taken 
in respect to this war, there is no step in which we have not fol- 
lowed the path of righteousness. In the outset we conformed to 
international law as a neutral nation. We permitted our mer- 
chants and manufacturers to furnish supplies of all kinds to the 
belligerents at the risk of losing them as contraband upon the 
high seas. Germany had avowed that to be the rule of interna- 
tional law and had pursued it in our war with Spain and in Eng- 
land's war with the Boers. Not for a hundred years has there 
been any doubt as to the correctness of that as the attitude of a 
neutral nation. More than that, it was virtuously right in this: 
had not nations, peace-loving and unprepared as most peace-lov- 
ing nations are, the right to resort to neutral countries and neutral 
merchants and neutral manufacturers, to prepare themselves 
suddenly against a war of aggression by a nation that looks for- 
ward to war as its normal future and is always prepared, then 
a nation seeking war domination of the world would have an 
overwhelming advantage over such peace-loving nations. There- 
fore the President and Congress were right in keeping open to 
peace-loving nations the opportunity, when forced into a war by 
a nation loving war and lusting for power, the means of 
preparing themselves against such unjust aggression. 

Then Germany sank, without warning, to the depths of the 
sea a vessel carrying 3000 innocent souls, and carried to their 
death 114 American citizens— men, women, and children, babes 
in arms. We protested, and Germany's answer was that the ves- 
sel was armed — a lie that enabled her to continue the correspond- 
ence for one full year. Then we said, when she sank the Sussex 
under similar circumstances, with American citizens on board, 
"We shall sever relations with you unless you discontinue." 
She discontinued for a time for the purpose of getting ready for 
a more ruthless warfare by continuing to make the submarines 
needed to carry it on. Then, in January last, she notified us that 
she intended to continue this ruthless warfare and to sink, with- 
out warning, every vessel, commercial or otherwise, neutral or 
otherwise, that came into a zone, 900 miles north and south and 
300 miles east and west, of the high seas off Great Britain, France, 
and the Mediterranean. 



Then we severed relations, as we said we would, and we re- 
turned to the bosom of his master that philanthropist and eminent 
Christian statesman— Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff ! 
They sank at once four American sailing vessels and sent to their 
deaths twenty-five American sailors, and then we declared that 
war existed. No other path was open to us. Our rights had 
not only been invaded, the rights of our citizens had not only 
been violated, but in a way that left us nothing but the duty of 
offering the sword in vindication. 

In the field of international law, the rules of war concerning 
the treatment of commercial vessels' at sea are as definite as the 
law in Virginia with respect to promissory notes and real estate. 
A belligerent may seize the vessel and the cargo of his enemy on 
the high seas and may sink it. He may seize a neutral vessel and 
a cargo violating the rules of war, but for a century the rule has 
been that in doing so, if he chooses to do so, he must put the 
crew, the officers, and the passengers of the captured vessel in a 
place of complete safety. 

Therefore, w^hen Germany sank the vessels she did sink, 
whether of the enemy or our own as neutrals, knowing that a 
sinking without warning involved the death of a large part of the 
company of the vessel sunk, she was guilty of deliberately taking 
the lives of citizens of other countries without warning and with- 
out right. 

Now, when a man kills another without right, he is guilty of 
murder. There is no other name that describes the crime of a 
nation which does the same thing. But it is said that those who 
went ought to have known the risk. Well, suppose they did. 
How does that change the crime of Germany ? Suppose John 
Smith meets John Robinson on the street and shoots him through 
the heart and he is haled into court under indictment and then 
he pleads: " I am not guilty. John Robinson knew, because I 
wrote him a letter and told him that if he came down into the 
street in front of his house I would shoot him. I am not guilty ; 
he is — of contributory negligence, that he came down in the street 
and met the bullet, the presence of which ought to have been 
anticipated." How would that plea sound in a court of justice ? 

So, having violated the rights of our citizens, and therefore 
our rights, what was our duty ? What is a government ? A 
government is a corporation of which we are all members, to 
which we render the duty of support, of service, military 
and civil, the payment of taxes, help of every kind; and we re- 
ceive from that corporation, as a quid pro quo protection — protec- 
tion as between ourselves, preservation of the rights of one as 
against another, and protection of the rights of each as against 
the invasion of a foreign country. On the high seas, on the deck 



9 

of an American vessel and under the American flag, a man is as 
much within the jurisdiction of the United States as if he 
stood on the shores of Virginia; and when a nation, a foreign 
nation, invades those rights by sending him to the bottom 
and kiUing him, there is no other course for the United States to 
take but to vindicate those rights, to demand reparation for violat- 
ing them, and to see to it that in the future the rights of other 
citizens are not similarly violated. 

No other path was open to us. Germany not only admitted 
that she had killed our citizens under circumstances that, of 
course, we must call murder, but she announced that she intended 
to murder other citizens— anyone who might assert his right to 
use the common highway of nations and go into that part of the 
high seas which Germany, without right and with an assertion of 
world domination, had fenced off against the other nations. 

If this had been Venezuela, we would have sent a message 
demanding reparation and security against further violation; and 
every man, woman, and child in the United States, Senator La- 
Follette, pacifists, conscientious objectors, and unconscientious 
objectors would have approved the action. What is the difference 
between that case and this ? None in principle, only in fact; and 
that fact is that Germany is the greatest military power in the 
world and Venezuela is not. 

Therefore those who oppose war in this instance, who object 
to the drawing of the sword to which Germany forces us if we 
would defend those rights, would put us in this situation: that we 
are in favor of the utmost sacrifice to protect our rights and those 
of our citizens against a nation if she is little enough and weak 
enough so that we can whip her with one hand, but if she is a 
great military nation, resistance to whose aggression requires war 
and sacrifice, then we will waive those rights because they are 
technical only. That appeals to no one with a sense of duty as 
an individual or as a government. 

President Wilson was criticized for the long delay in asserting 
those rights. That question we pretermit; it is past. We are 
neither Republicans nor Democrats now. We are Americans in 
supporting the President in this righteous war. 

So we find ourselves in a war for a cause for which, in no 
scintilla, need we apologize, need we defend, need we explain. 
We are in the war because we could not help it. We are in the 
war from no jingo spirit. We are in the war from a sense of duty 
as a country and from our sense of duty as a nation of the world. 
What were our traditions in the Revolution ? What those in the 
Civil War ? What was the position we won in the world ? A na- 
tion upholding justice. What if now we flinch and do not meet 
the issue ! 



10 

We find ourselves now in war, arrayed with the democracies 
of the world against the autocracies — against one autocracy, and 
that is Germany. The rest are merely " and company," merely 
"me, too." Germany is our enemy, and as we understand Ger- 
many, as we understand the psychological condition and status of 
Germany, we understand the war, and we do not understand it 
otherwise. We find that the cause which carried us into the war, 
righteous as it was, is only one phase of the greater cause of 
the great World War that we are now engaged in. It comes from 
the insane obsession of the German people, led by a Hohenzollern 
and the Prussian military regime, that they are carrying out God's 
purpose in a world domination for the improvement of civilization 
by the spread of kultur by force. And you cannot know the dan- 
ger to the civilization of the world, to the family of nations, of 
this condition of mind (diseased as it is ) of the German people, 
unless you study their history. They are an intellectual people ; 
they are a home-loving people; they are a music- and poetry-loving 
people; they are a people of great keenness, great tenacity of 
purpose, lacking in humor and so lacking in a sense of proportion; 
and when we knew them years ago, we liked them. They were 
genial and kindly to animals. We do not hate the Germans. It 
is not our business to hate them. We will not hate them after 
the war is over; but what we hate is their purpose, their present 
condition of mind, and unless we change that, the world is to suf- 
fer in the future from a constantly recurring system of war, en- 
tered upon to gratify the ambitions of the Hohenzollerns, and the 
insane purpose of the German people to follow what they regard 
as their God-given destiny to subordinate the world to their will, 
in the acceptance of kultur and their method of instructing in it. 

In the early part of the nineteenth century they were twenty- 
eight different states— Austria at the head, Prussia next, and 
twenty-six other states. The other states were kingdoms and 
dukedoms and electorates, under the rule of kinglets,, dukelets, 
and electors— little despots governing by the divine right of kings ! 
Then they had a revolution in 1848 by liberty-loving Germans, 
who did not succeed and were driven out and came to this 
country and made a valuable part of our citizenship. Their 
blood in the Civil War was found on every battlefield, where they 
struggled, as they thought and believed, for liberty and the 
suppression of slavery. Their descendants have made valuable 
citizens with us. 

The people they left behind went under a different environ- 
ment and different education. Bismarck came into their lives and 
planned the unity of Germany, not by constitutional monarchy 
and the institution of civil liberty, but by blood and iron; and he 
carried it through. He organized the Prussian Army with the 



11 

tradition of drill and effectiveness derived from the time of 
Frederick the Great and his father. He added to that and 
strengthened it, and then he began his plan. 

I am not telling you anything that is merely inference from 
what he did. I am telling you what he says himself. He car- 
ried on three wars — wars in which he so arranged it that they 
were all wars of aggression against Germany. He took from 
Denmark Schleswig-Holstein and annexed it to Prussia. He 
wiped Austria off the map of Germany, and took Hanover and 
Hesse Cassel and Frankfort, and united the Southern German 
states to him by an offensive and defensive alliance, and then 
he waited until Napoleon should declare war against him. He 
prepared for the war and then led Napoleon on to declare it. 
Then he defeated France and he took Alsace-Lorraine and an 
indemnity of $1,000,000,000, which he put into the army. He 
crowned his king German Emperor. He went back to Berlin and 
sat down and digested in peace the bits of territory which he had 
chewed off from the rest of Europe. 

This turned the heads of the German people. Such an un- 
usual series of military successes put them in a state of exaltation 
that was unsafe for them and unsafe for the world. They said: 
*' We have done this by the application of scientific principles to 
the art of war. We will apply this to the arts of peace." They 
went into manufacturing, into agriculture, into the field of 
business, and they achieved a wonderful success. They did it 
under Bismarck and they did it under William. They accumu- 
lated wealth. They increased their prosperity. They increased 
their population. They looked at themselves with perfect satis- 
faction and with a self -adoration that led to their obsession. 
Looking back over their success, they could not reconcile them- 
selves to their existence except by close association with God. So 
they proceeded to assume that they were the chosen people of 
God; that God looked upon their work with satisfaction and upon 
them as agents to carry this work to the other nations; and as it 
had been won by force — military force— they created the German 
State into an instrument of God, and, acting for God, they easily 
reached the conclusion that there was no consideration that could 
be yielded to in the progress of that State. Thus they abolished 
morality for the State. They laid down the rule: "There is no 
international morality." Decency, humanity, respect for the 
obligation of treaties all disappeared when the interests and 
the progress of the State were concerned. And that is our 
enemy — as dangerous to the family of nations as a mad dog is in 
a domestic family, waiting only the opportunity to strike when 
success may follow the stroke. 

You ask proof — read literature. You ask why we did not 



12 

know it before. We assumed they were extremists. We have 
them among ourselves— I do not name them. We do not want to 
be held responsible for them. But these were not extremists. 
They spoke the word that had sunk to the hearts of the people. 
The principles were taught in the primary schools, in the acade- 
mies, and from the lecture platforms of the universities. Their 
lecturers, their great leaders in philosophy, taught them. In 
their sermons you saw it crop out here and there. Read the 
sermons— one addressed to a "German God; " another a prayer 
to " Him who presides in the Heaven above the seraphim and 
the cherubim and the Zeppelins." The association of the sera- 
phim and the cherubim with the Zeppelins is incongruous and 
irreverent to us, but to the German mind seems all right, for the 
reason that all are agencies of the Deity, and the Zeppelins are 
carrying out the God-given purpose and policy of kultur by drop- 
ping explosives on East London, numbering among their victims 
the school children and the old men and old women of that city. 
It is shocking, my friends, it is shocking when you think of the 
change that has come about through this horrible, hideous phil- 
osophy into which the Germans have led themselves. 

If you wish proof in addition, read what the Kaiser says. 
He is always associating himself with God in a personal way. 
"Forward with God ! " He says that "God is with us uncondi- 
tionally, with avowed support." " Unconditionally "—that is, 
" without regard to what we have done. The purpose, the end, 
the destiny is what we must look to, not the means." He claims 
an intimate association with God and communications denied to 
other people. Now, that is a condition of a perverted mental 
state, but it is a condition so dangerous that we cannot allow it 
to continue in this world when it is backed up by the application 
of the highest scientific principles to the destruction of men. 

I cannot take time to point out how completely responsible 
Germany is for this war and its character, but when you meet 
those who have been at the front and who have come back 
(as I did the other day) and hear from them the horrible nature 
of this war, its mechanical, physical brutality, its desire to de- 
stroy men; and when you then look back upon our Civil War- 
that was bloody, lives were lost, but there was a chivalry, there 
was a kindliness between the sides, there were obligations even 
in war that were kept, there was a glamour about it, courage, 
bravery, and chivalry, reflecting the natural gentleness of the 
people engaged, — when you compare these two wars you realize 
that today in Europe, under the influence of this cruel German 
philosophy, it is blood and destruction of the most brutal char- 
acter—anything, anything for military advance and military 
success. 



13 

That presents the problem to us. Our Allies have been 
fighting this monster for three years. They are nearly exhausted, 
and we are praying and should be praying that they may hold 
oat until we can get there with our forces, so as to predominate in 
man power and win this world war for righteousness, and forever 
stamp out this horrible philosophy, this crass materialism, this 
brutal murder of the human race which Germany makes the 
object of her government, in order that, through the blood of 
other men, she may march on to control the world. 

Therefore it is that you, my boys, have before you an 
opportunity to show the value of these equalities of opportunity. 
Show that you are not only citizens of the United States, but 
citizens of the world. Do not allow yourselves to be misled by 
the thought that peace is near. All these dealings of Germany 
with the Bolsheviki amount to nothing except a moving around 
on the chessboard for the advantage of Germany, so that she 
may acquire control of Russia and her supplies. It is enough to 
make one first laugh and then cry to note the dealings of 
Trotsky and representatives of the Bolsheviki with the armed 
leaders of Germany for a peace — a peace of the world — a peace 
of the world's workers, as Trotsky says. There is an old 
maxim that "he who dines with the devil must have a long 
spoon" — but the Bolsheviki spoon has no handle at all ! 

Now, my boys, think of General Armstrong. He led 
a colored regiment in the war for your race. Would he be a 
pacifist in these days ? Would he fail to see clearly what is 
before us now ? We should thank God that w^e are in the battle 
now, rather than waiting until these European countries, fighting 
our battle, have been defeated by this monster of mihtarism, so 
that we should have to measure swords with it alone. 

Do not listen to arguments of pacifism ; do not allow sug- 
gestions that are mere camouflage about coming peace. We can 
have no peace until we whip Germany, until we produce in the 
minds of the Germans a conviction that the policy they have 
followed is all in vain; that it comes from the devil and not from 
God ; and then they will attend to the form of government that 
they ought to have. They will become an amenable and human 
member of the society of nations again, and they will relegate 
the Kaiser and the rest of the "Potsdam gang" to the place 
where they ought to go. 

There are over two hundred Hampton students and grad- 
uates already in the war. I hope there may be many others. 
Do not give up your education until you are called. Do not 
think it necessary for you to rush in until you have finished, until 
you are called, because you will be better men and better officers 
when you are called. But be ready. Do not look forward to 



14 

a speedy end of the war, but grit your teeth. Make yourselves feel 
that you cannot offer up your lives in a higher cause than this ; 
not even the War of the Revolution nor the War of the Rebellion 
offered greater reason for sacrifice than this. 

Now God bless you, boys, and go on with the Hampton 
spirit, for that is the spirit that will carry you to the victory we 
must have if the human race is to live in Christian civilization. 



LIBRARY OF CONOKt^^ 



021 547 981 ft 




